Cedar Coleman, senior director of web hosting operations at the firm, told The Reg that service was intermittent in Europe.

"Customers were temporarily unable to reach their websites due to a large distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in our EU hosting server environment. Filters were immediately applied to mitigate the situation and service was restored at 7.40pm," he said. "At this time all service has been restored. The Go Daddy 24/7 security operation centre continues to monitor the situation and is committed to making the internet a safe place for our customers."

Coleman didn't say if anyone had claimed responsibility for the DDoS attack.

GoDaddy was downed for a day in September last year in what was claimed by one lone hacker as a DDoS attack. The firm said that service outage was "not caused by external influences" but was actually an internal problem. ®